Think of a restaurant you’ve stumbled in to where it turns out that all of the staff are trained in intellectual property litigation. Get ready to argue over the amount of the tip.
Research on a book project has recently taken me to the far and cavernous precincts of music licensing, with topics like copyrighting songs, payment to play music in businesses, and collecting royalties from others who perform ‘covers.’ I have only one word for the experience of wading in to this byzantine subject: Yikes! My advice is that if you have the urge to sing in the shower, for your own good it would be good to do it sotto voce. Anyone could be listening. And you could be in even more hot water for not clearing the song with the publisher, a record company, or the performance rights organization that represents the songwriter.
No wonder there has been a spate of recent stories about the questionable mental health of musicians trying to survive within the music industry. It’s an enviable goal to build a career in music. But it is clearly not for the faint of heart. Think of a restaurant you’ve stumbled into where it turns out that all of the staff are trained in intellectual property litigation. It may not be your best meal. And the tip will be a matter of contention.
All of these is both a surprise and a disappointment, since music remains one of the happier experiences of living our lives. It’s little wonder that the legendary Quincy Jones–the composer, musician and world-class producer–thinks of the business side of his work as a “disaster.”
Taylor Swift has recently been doing battle with her record label and publisher, Big Machine. They own her masters and the copyrights to most of her older music, and she wants them back. With some justification her label argues that they invested heavily in her when she was a young teen starting out. But now, buying back the rights to her music outright–if she succeeds–with probably run into a few hundred million dollars. In the meantime, she’s released a music video to torment her music-mogul opponents, Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta.
To be sure, Ms. Swift will land on her feet. She has loyal and vocal fans. And it’s certainly easier to admire her as a performer than a relatively faceless investment firm, the Carlyle Group, which has an interest in Big Machine. In addition, music lovers also love to hate record labels. It seems like it has always been that way at least since the days of Napster. The big music groups that own the labels are often seen as taking over copyrights representing the labor of their very human musical “partners,” only to fail to deliver the promotion and success they promised in exchange.
Swift has obviously done well with Big Machine, but she wants more control of what and where she performs. However, a more typical case is perhaps the jazz/classical cellist, Zoe Keating, who is continually underwhelmed by her annual royalty statement from Spotify–now the largest streamer in the music business. According to The Guardian, in 2018 she received all of $0.0054 per play from the streaming service. Still, Spotify complains that they can’t make any real money.
It’s obvious only the biggest mega-stars receive royalties sufficient to live on. Most need to tour relentlessly, where ticket and incidental sales of extras can net enough income to get by.
Many of us are fascinated by this industry because its products are often so great. But it seems to resemble something like a big and colorful aquarium: better to enjoy it from the outside than to swim with the sharks inside.
Even very good arguments describing musicians who are deprived of compensation usually have no impact on downloaders.
Communication often involves thinking strategically to find the right appeals that will produce compliance in a target audience. Searching for ways to induce others to accept the kinds of choices we endorse is always a challenge. And while it usually makes sense to focus on what works—strategies that show some success in getting agreement—I am struck with how difficult it is to produce one kind of change: convincing individuals that a favored leisure activity is a bad ethical choice. It almost never works.
There are no shortages of relevant cases where we have all have been on the sending or receiving end of these appeals: criticizing attendance at sporting events that can result in serious injuries to the participants (boxing, football), decrying a life-style choice that wastes resources (owning a mile-to-the-gallon cigarette boat or SUV), attending performances that include individuals charged with making bad choices (avoiding films by Woody Allen), using products that come with significant health risks (smoking, racing motorcycles), and so on. We all struggle with the apparent hypocrisy of violating our own values in the pursuit of the things we enjoy.
One especially good case study is the plea from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and any number of musicians to not download “pirated” music. The request is to instead purchase “legal” singles and albums from record companies or online retailers, who will then distribute royalties to songwriters and musicians. The cause seems just, even though the industry can be its own worst enemy, as in attempts by Warner Music to go after restaurants and public venues where someone might sing “Happy Birthday to you,” a song they erroneously claimed to own.
Piracy is no longer a new problem. But one can look at the state of the music industry today and conclude that the digital revolution has been cruel to musicians. Stephen Witt’s recent book, How Music Got Free (Viking, 2015) is just the latest account of the unraveling of the record business, mostly at the hands of ordinary listeners who can now copy music files without payment. Witt reports that there was only one platinum album (1 million units shipped) in 2014. The singer was Taylor Swift, and–as television’s ET reports– even she’s not happy.
We simply don’t buy as much recorded music any more. We rent it, sometimes legally from online services, and often borrow it from each other, bypassing a legitimate path for distributing royalties. Fewer albums and singles are sold today because a digital copy of any one can function as a “master” available to make many more.
I’m always impressed with how little impact solid arguments about musicians deprived of compensation actually have on listeners, which means most of us. We simply resist linking our behavior to the theft or “piracy” of someone’s creative work. It’s not that we have to worry about whether Ms. Swift will be able to pay the light bill. It’s that musicians in virtually every musical category have been cut off from revenue streams that could support them.
And so a simple quid pro quo can be made: To support the musicians you like, buy their music. But images of talented modern musicians living as paupers doesn’t motivate in the ways one might expect. Adding in the argument that downloading is “theft” of their intellectual property hardly results in the kind of cognitive dissonance a persuader might expect.
Even students who are also budding musicians don’t seem to take the bait. Perhaps they should. As RIAA spokesman Cary Sherman noted in a 2012 speech, the Bureau of labor statistics estimates there is a 41% drop since 1999 in people who identify themselves as musicians. That corresponds to a continuing decline in the sale of recorded music of all sorts. Even though more albums are being released, most (80%) sell less than 100 copies.
At several levels it’s obvious why we do not heed requests to change a behavior we enjoy. Our leisure passions are linked to our personal identity. To give them up is to face the unwelcome thought of becoming at least a slightly different person. Then, too, the immediate rewards of our passion are much more tangible than compliance with a behavioral ideal. It’s probably only a few academics and some musicians who like to intellectualize potential hypocrisies.
In addition, we can generate perfect rationalizations that will take us off the hook. We look for cases that will confirm a prefered view that no harm is done. Using this kind of process of “motivated reasoning,” we focus on the single instance that minimizes the power of arguments for change. Hence: “Taylor Swift will never miss the puny royalties she would get from a legal download,” or “I paid too much to hear Paul McCartney last year,” or “I live by the principle that the internet ‘wants to be free.'” And so we find ways to not notice the lie that separates our best instincts from our actions.
